By Amanda Fajak, Global Culture Practice Leader, ZRG Consulting Solutions

We are living in an age of great uncertainty, driven in large part by fundamentally disruptive technologies, geo-political changes, and radical rethinking about the future of work. Despite the rapid changes in our structures, systems, and technology, the key to thriving in this uncertainty lies, as it always has done, in people and our uniquely human capabilities. Now, more than ever, we must work together to build the cultures necessary for individual and organizational success.

This article will look at three key business challenges facing organisations and their people – AI and its impacts on corporate culture, improving accountability to increase productivity, and developing the adaptive mindset needed in today’s pivot-fast world. While AI is relatively new, the other two are perennial problems our clients face. However, all three issues are connected, and their human-centred solutions similar.

AI and Workplace Culture
As Karim Lakhani rightly states in this Harvard Business Review article, AI won’t replace humans — but humans with AI will replace humans without AI. We believe AI is a core enabler of individual performance and organizational success.

Effective use of AI can help drive personal productivity, freeing up employees from drowning in administrivia to deliver the more value-adding work that only we can do. In our experience, AI adoption is not just a problem for IT departments to solve, and won’t be fixed by hiring more data scientists or engineers. The organisations that are accelerating on the move to AI are building a fundamental and foundational set of mindsets, beliefs, and behaviours to adopt AI to increase productivity and enable long-term growth.

So, the question your organization needs to answer is not if, or when, but how do you create an AI-ready culture, now?

What defines corporate cultures that easily adopt and integrate AI?
Regardless of industry or organisation size, a defining characteristic driving business success today is your people having an adaptive mindset. What we observe is that organisations where this mindset prevails have increased resilience and are able to tolerate ambiguity for longer, drive forward during uncertainty, and pivot fast.

In the case of AI, this means that they are more rapidly taking advantage of the business benefits of new technology. In adaptive cultures, experimentation – the desire and ability to test and try, to see what is possible, and works for you – is actively encouraged and, as a consequence, through trial and error, adoption of AI is accelerated.

What is clear is that organisations with an adaptive mindset are better prepared to embrace AI as an opportunity to improve skills, increase productivity, and drive performance, meaning they position themselves to be the winners in this new AI-driven world.

How To Prepare Your Workplace Culture for AI Readiness
These are three activities you can immediately get started with that will make a massive difference:
● Senior leadership role modelling – have your executives actively experiment with and use AI (as Larry Hartmann, ZRG CEO, does), talk about why your organization is deploying it, and encourage employees to experiment.
● Build belief – fear of the unknown is the most common reason employees do not engage with AI. Leaders need to demystify AI, openly address fears and build belief by telling stories about its benefits.
● Skills development – capability is foundational to AI adoption, so be clear on what AI systems you are using, why, and proactively promote training.

In our experience, AI adoption is in part about the technology, but it’s far more a cultural challenge. Our advice is to take the time to build AI readiness in terms of the mindsets, beliefs, and behaviours to adopt, and leverage AI to increase productivity and sustainable success in this new, shape-shifting world.

Improving Accountability to Increase Productivity
Against this backdrop of global uncertainty, the question we hear again and again from organisations is how do you get your people to be as efficient, effective, and engaged as they can be, and avoid the wasted effort and intense frustration that a lack of accountability causes?

Why is accountability a pressing issue for organisations?
Cost pressures are everywhere. When your organization has a culture that lacks accountability, you see people wasting huge amounts of time and energy on duplication, rework, and chasing. Our research shows this can account for up to 30 per cent of an employee’s time, and this loss of productivity across an organization carries a huge cost.

The question we often ask is, imagine if you could improve accountability by just 10 per cent, what would be the benefits? The answer we get conclusively is that improving accountability generates enormous real-time savings (i.e. reduction of rework, duplication, delays, missed deadlines), significantly reduces frustration (i.e. from chasing, escalation, fixing, worrying, fire drill responses), and improves employee engagement (better trust from reliability, better renegotiation of promises, less stress).

What impacts does a lack of accountability have on culture and business performance?
There are two big impacts a lack of accountability can have on workplace culture and business performance:
1. Lack of trust. What we observe time and time again is that when people don’t feel they can rely on others, trust breaks down irrevocably. That means your people won’t collaborate at the very moment when you most need them to be connected to one another and pulling in the same direction. Second-guessing others slows you down at a time where being adaptive is essential and speed is a competitive differentiator.
2. Poor/no decision making. If no one is held accountable, in most cases, decision making is slow and poor decisions may go unchallenged or uncorrected, eroding the quality of outcomes over time. Without clear accountability of tasks or outcomes, employees have a tendency to delay work, pass blame, or avoid responsibilities, leading to bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

How can you improve accountability?
Improving accountability isn’t easy, but there are four key activities that in our experience cost nothing to implement, but can really move the needle:
● Be clear in your requests. Ambiguity of the ask is one of the primary barriers to accountability, so being crystal clear about what you are asking the other person for is essential.
● Proactively negotiate and re-negotiate. In an agile world, priorities can change quickly, so striking a balance between holding people to account and being prepared to renegotiate is a key skill. We want promises to matter, however as a leader it’s important to remember that rigidity is not realistic in our world and proactive renegotiation is a wise accountability tactic.
● Make good promises. Double check that people are not just saying ‘yes’ lightly. Take the time to test that a commitment is doable and keep communicating to avoid any surprises.
● Remember… accountability is a behaviour, not a program. Accountability is not a one and done exercise. It’s a daily behaviour that needs constant practice to ingrain it in your culture. Even if you have mastered this behaviour, our experience is that you need to keep a focus on it to maintain it over time.

We are increasingly finding that accountability is a foundational mindset and behaviour in successful organisations. It unlocks significantly higher levels of collaboration, productivity, and adaptability. The latter is particularly important in our BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear and Incomprehensible) world because when you face an environment of perpetual flux, being adaptable is your only chance of survival.

Adaptive Mindset – the Key to Building an Agile Culture
As humans, we are inherently adaptable. In this decade alone, we’ve already handled a global pandemic, fundamental shifts in the nature of work, AI, geo-political upheaval and much more. But to stay competitive, organisations have to be able to respond to change quickly and seamlessly. The real challenge is, how do you scale an adaptive mindset across your organization, so you develop the agile culture that is essential to survive, let alone thrive, amid constant change and uncertainty?

Why are so many organisations struggling with the adaptive mindset?
Our view is that organisational agility, and an agile culture, is the outcome of having an adaptive mindset – also the key ingredient for AI adoption. Many organisations struggle with developing adaptive mindsets for a mix of cultural, structural, and psychological reasons.

Historically, organisations have been built on stability, control, and predictability, so often people stick to what worked in the past, even though it’s no longer effective. While many organisations have implemented agile processes, because they do not have the underlying adaptive mindset required, they are do-ing agile, not be-ing agile. Adaptive thinking requires more than changing processes, it means shifting the underlying beliefs and mindsets of employees. Many cultures punish mistakes, so people avoid risk. That fear stifles flexibility. Leaders often talk about agility, but don’t role model the behaviours themselves, and if the leadership isn’t open to experimentation, learning, and pivoting, the rest of the organisation won’t be either.

Why is an adaptive mindset so important in today’s BANI world?
Our experience is that an adaptive mindset enables you to face uncertainty head-on, make decisions with incomplete information, and build your personal resilience. But to be clear, the adaptive mindset and the agility it creates isn’t just about speed, it’s about creating a culture defined by experimentation, collaboration, customer centricity, and empowerment so you don’t just react to changes, you proactively harness them to your advantage. And in a world where the pace of change is heading one way, the ability to respond quickly, overcome resistance, iterate and innovate, and continue to execute becomes a key differentiator for your business.

For example, Amazon pivoted during COVID-19. It rapidly expanded its logistics and warehousing to meet increased demand, implemented contactless delivery, and relocated staff from low demand to high-demand fulfilment centres. A 2021 McKinsey study found that organisations that were more adaptive were 1.5 times more likely to outperform competitors.

Make no mistake, this is a Kodak moment, where a more effective way of working has come along, and if organisations don’t embrace it, they’ll be left behind.
Agility is not simply one of many options – it is the only one. And if you don’t start building this adaptive mindset soon, it will be too late.

How can you build an organizational adaptive mindset?
The most successful organisations we see, ruthlessly prioritize building an adaptive mindset. It starts with three core ingredients:

1. Having a North Star. In our experience it is a fine line between being adaptive and tipping into chaos. The key difference in organisations who get the balance right is that they have a clear purpose and set of goals keeping their people focused, even as you need to constantly course correct to adapt to your environment.
2. Building personal resilience as a core capability. Equipping your people to build their personal resilience, comfort with ambiguity and adaptable mindset enables them to lead themselves and others through whatever change is to come.
3. Encouraging psychological safety. In our view, psychological safety is an essential enabler for people to experiment and have a voice, and bring in the views of the customer, opportunities for efficiency and new market insights. In this way, hearing directly from your people allows you to adapt faster, and the data proves it – Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson’s research revealed that teams with high psychological safety are 76% more likely to adapt successfully in volatile markets.

There is no question, companies with an adaptive mindset are better placed to be customer focused, harness resilience, and when they are anchored to their purpose, enabled to continue delivering despite uncertainty. The question is no longer whether organisations should adopt agility, it’s whether they have the adaptive mindset necessary to make it work.

We may be living in an age of chaos, but there are core cultural capabilities you can build – including accountability, experimentation, and resilience – that will propel your business growth, no matter what happens.

ZRG Consulting Solutions partner in business transformation, leadership acceleration, culture transformation, assessment & succession planning, executive and leadership coaching, and talent acquisition.

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